Bruce Arthur: Raptors fans, take a tip from Kawhi and savour the moment

Bruce Arthur: Raptors fans, take a tip from Kawhi and savour the moment

Blowout loss to LeBron’s Cavs despite roster machinations brings back bad memories of last year’s The Toronto Raptors might be the second-best team in the Eastern Conference, but you’d never know right now “ I thought we really could have really blew the game out early in the first half.” Read more

Opinion | Bruce Arthur : Raptors buzzer beaten by LeBron’s Cavs in Game 3. “It seems like it’s one He’s right: the only reason LeBron had the chance to make that shot was that the Raptors had Flip that game and this series looks so unbelievably different. LeBron James ignored the Raptors ’

MILWAUKEE—Against Philadelphia, sometimes the Toronto Raptors offence looked scared. Maybe scared is the wrong word: spooked, squirrelly, vexed. The 76ers were huge. Joel Embiid was terrifying. The series concluded in Game 7 with Kawhi Leonard all but shouldering the whole thing.

Then Toronto escaped, and it was a new chance, and for a while it looked like they were free. They defended the galactic Giannis Antetokounmpo as well as you can. They held the other Bucks back from three. And for a while, they absorbed every Milwaukee run, and pushed back. Kyle Lowry, it seemed, couldn’t miss.

Bruce Arthur: Raptors need a better way to manage the load in Game 2

MILWAUKEE—It was just one game, but of course nothing is just one game. To get to where the Toronto Raptors are, most of the mountain has to have been climbed already. You can reduce the seven-month burden with load management, as the phrase goes. You can stop practising. The Raptors still practise once in a while, sure. But they may not again. This is partly because Toronto is loading minutes on their main players like minutes are an all-you-can-carry shopping spree. And they are doing this because, well, somebody’s got to play.

BOXSCORE: Raptors 106, Bucks 100. DeRozan broke the tie with a jumper and, after missed 3-pointers by Malcolm Brogdon and Matthew Dellavedova Raptors : Ibaka started despite a sore left ankle sustained when he stepped on Antetokounmpo’s foot in the third quarter of Game 1 . … Lowry

And then the Raptors won 59 games, beat good teams, beat great teams. They tore the idea of themselves apart and DeMar DeRozan and OG Anunoby react on the bench late in Thursday night’s blowout loss to the Cavaliers in The Raptors had blown Game 1 when they had a chance , before

And they still couldn’t grab this chance, and it may come back to haunt them. After leading by as many as 13 in the first half, and by seven entering the fourth quarter, the Raptors simply stopped scoring late, and lost Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final 108-100 to Milwaukee. This was a blown chance, and they’re only allowed three more.

It was the same story: the Raptors are struggling to find enough offence. Kawhi Leonard had to work against Khris Middleton, and he had to work against a crowd. He went 10-for-26 for his 31 points, and scored just two in the fourth. You could live with that, maybe. But they couldn’t.

Marc Gasol just didn’t make the shots he got. Pascal Siakam got away from Embiid only to run into Antetokounmpo, who can make the Cameroonian look a little like a mini-me. Danny Green wasn’t getting shots again, just like he wasn’t getting shots in Game 7. The bench wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t much.

Bruce Arthur: Raptors come to Kawhi’s rescue, even series with Bucks

Kawhi Leonard looked like your dad, creaking and slow, first thing in the morning. Who wouldn’t, really? He had taken everything, eaten all that he could, gone past what he probably thought were his limits. Finally, Kawhi looked tired. Carry a team long enough, and it wears on the legs. And that’s before you really start to limp. And finally, the Toronto Raptors had to be the ones to pick him up. Game 4 of the Eastern Conference final against the Milwaukee Bucks was basically the season. Might as well be a team. With so much on the line, the Raptors finally showed up in full, blowing out the Bucks 120-102 to even the series at two games.

The latest Tweets from Bruce Arthur (@ bruce _ arthur ). Toronto Star sports columnist, father of four, TSN contributor. This is a fun game . You list six bands/artists that you've seen at a gig/concert and one lie. People leave a reply with who they think is the lie.

In Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, the Toronto Raptors held a lead for all 48 minutes until the game reached overtime, where the Cleveland Cavaliers got their first lead on a Kyle Korver top-of-the0-key triple. The Cavaliers eventually won the game, leaving the Raptors and their fans stunned.

Milwaukee crashed the offensive glass, got to the line, got 29 from centre Brook Lopez, and Giannis can’t be fully contained. Lowry didn’t look like a guy whose thumb had been wrenched out of the socket three days earlier. At times, they played free.

This is a new chance. But not an easy one.

“I mean, I think for some guys, you could even actually use those exact words: You had a clean slate,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse before the game. “This series presents a new team, a new set of opportunities, right, a new set of issues, whatever it is. And man, I hope we make some more of those shots. I’ve been saying that for a while, though.”

He had. Internally, Toronto believed that the offence would actually do better against Milwaukee’s top-ranked D than it did against Philadelphia, because the 76ers size was simply devastating. They noted Fred VanVleet and Norman Powell had played well against the Bucks in the past, and hoped they would be playable again. Well, not in three-reserve lineups, they weren’t.

Bucks rally to take Game 1 from Raptors

Brook Lopez scored 13 of his career playoff-high 29 points in the fourth quarter and Milwaukee closed the game on a 10-0 run to beat the Toronto.

Read More >>. The Toronto Raptors lost Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals to the Miami Heat in an overtime thriller. Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry threw up a prayer at the buzzer, nailing the half-court shot to force overtime, but other than that, he had a poor game.

The Toronto Raptors had just been blown to smithereens with a chance to eliminate the Indiana Pacers “The season would be a failure if we don’t make it out of this first round, give ourselves a chance to What fans said about Raptors ' loss . Two years ago the Raptors showed up in Game 7

The defence was the thing they could count on, in theory. Before the game, Nurse said that the Raptors didn’t need to decide between collapsing on Giannis’s rampages to the rim and sticking with the Bucks shooters. He said, “For right now it’s not an either/or. You’ve got to do both.”

Well, Toronto’s defence collapsed well on Antetokounmpo, and usually recovered to contest shots. That it took Giannis 13 first-half shots to score 13 points while the Bucks shot 6-23 from three-point range — well, that was not quite best-case, but it was close. Milwaukee was still 6-for-34 from three going into the fourth, which was a huge — and possibly irreplicable — help. It couldn’t fully last.

The Raptors just needed to make shots. They needed to find enough offence, where they could. They couldn’t.

“I hope we make some, and I hope we create them,” said Nurse. “As long as we’re creating them, and I hope we’re getting some more people involved. I think we really need to, I think we have for most of the year, and I think we’ve shot it for most of the year.

“And I just think that the games that we do shoot it pretty well, our defence even gets better. The energy kind of feeds itself.”

Bruce Arthur: Raptors must share the load to have a shot against Bucks

The shot changed everything, right? It changed everything. Kawhi Leonard hit The Shot and the Toronto Raptors won Game 7 and it felt to Raptors fans like the world was reborn anew. It was emotional. But as the Raptors open the Eastern Conference final against the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks Wednesday night, the same fundamental questions have to be answered. Technically, Toronto is halfway to a title: eight wins down, eight to go. But the Raptors are only about halfway to determining their proper identity, too. See: Kawhi. “We really lean on him a lot,” said Raptors centre Marc Gasol, whose offensive reticence was an issue in the 76ers series.

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Of course Siri knows the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Toronto Raptors , 115 to 84 in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Meanwhile, the Raptors had just one day of rest and 14 playoff games before coming to Cleveland.

In their Game 1 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks , the Raptors were nearly the worst version of Kyle Lowry tries to beat the defence of Bucks forward Spencer Hawes as Raptors centre Jonas And they are so long, so otherworldly. Honestly, the Cleveland Cavaliers might be a better matchup, or at least

Whatever happened, this was a Milwaukee team that had been sitting around for a week after waxing Boston. This series was a collision of interlocking pieces, and if you looked at them individually you could see startling similarities. Two-way superstars? Giannis, and Kawhi. Long, limb-y scoring forwards? Middleton, Siakam. Fireplug point guards? Eric Bledsoe, and Lowry. Lopez and Gasol at centre, Nik Mirotic and Serge Ibaka as helpful power forwards, and Green and Malcolm Brogdon as sharpshooting guards.

The Bucks were stronger after that top six. So the real question was how the pieces fit together, and against one another. The Raptors won two fewer games than Milwaukee this season while mixing and matching and experimenting, while the Bucks were the college student who had everything in order more or less all year long. You could also argue the Bucks hadn’t really played anybody yet, since Detroit’s best player was on one leg, and Boston was so sick of Kyrie Irving that all Milwaukee had to do was locate the self-destruct button, and gently urge the Celtics to push it.

But the Bucks are tough, and will continue to be tough. Look, those Celtics Game 1 in Milwaukee by a lot, and four games later their backup point guard was airing after-season grievances on ESPN. The Raptors can play in this series, but they have missed their first shot. This will be hard.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based sports columnist. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur

Raptors betting underdogs at Bucks in pivotal Game 5.
The Toronto Raptors hope to take their first lead of the Eastern Finals on Thursday against the Milwaukee Bucks as betting underdogs at the sportsbooks.

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